VERY OLD BONES

Searchers have found bones and a skull that may be part of the remains of guerrilla leader Che Guevara. The find came late Tuesday night, just as the Bolivian government was ready to suspend two weeks of digging under an airstrip in southern Bolivia. The search began two weeks ago after two retired army generals said that Guevara and some of his followers were buried in a mass grave under an airstrip. An ardent Marxist, Guevara was one of the leading figures in Fidel Castro's rebellion against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista Zaldivar. He later tried to export the revolution to Central and South America, where he was ambushed and executed by Bolivian soldiers in 1967. Guevara's bullet-ridden corpse was displayed for two days before authorities decided to secretly dispose of it so that the revolutionary's resting place would not become a martyr's shrine. Scientists at the site say it will take at least a week to identify the remains. They should be easy to spot: according to Bolivia's interior minister, Carlos Sanchez, the Argentine revolutionary's hands were cut off as he was executed.